Happiness By Design

Three Keys To Happiness That You're Probably Overlooking Right Now

I would also like to claim that you should want to get as much pleasure and purpose out of life as you can (properly accounting for the impact you have on other people’s happiness). And that is all you should want. But what about achievement and a successful career? Surely these are good desires to have? Well, there is no doubt that achieving a goal can feel pretty good. But these are only fleeting moments, so the process of attempting to get there should be a pleasurable and/or purposeful one, too.

It is also true that the desire to achieve can bring happiness later on — but only for those who do achieve. Some great studies have looked at the desires people expressed when they were students and then the difference between these desires and their achievements 20 or so years later. Those who as students were motivated by making money turned out to be greatly affected by whether or not they became wealthy later in their lives. If they did, they were satisfied with their lives, but many did not make as much as they would have liked to, so they were not that satisfied. The message from this research is that if you care a lot about money, you better make sure you get it. If you don't become rich, then being motivated by money will, unsurprisingly, lead to disappointment.

Even if you do become rich, you might give up too much along the way to get there. You might lose some good friends, for example, when you replace a six-pack on the sofa with your mates for a champagne cocktail in a swanky bar with your work colleagues. Be especially alert to the fact that a desire for achievement may help in achieving a narrow set of goals — but at the expense of the more important goal of happiness. It is good being motivated to be successful at work, but not at the cost of poor health and strained personal relationships. Sometimes we can get so wrapped up in things that the attainment of a goal becomes all that matters. Some people will make extreme sacrifices to achieve them — like the many climbers who have died on Everest because they are obsessed with getting to the top. In these cases, the attainment of their goals comes at too great a price for happiness.

It is certainly true that pursuing a goal (as well as cutting down on cigarettes, alcohol, chocolate, porn or Facebook) can be a challenge in the short term and may make you feel less happy for a while. We stick with goals like this because we think they’ll make us happier in the long run. Sometimes the gain may not to be worth the pain, but you always think it will be at the outset. It would simply be masochistic for you to make a decision that you knew for sure would make you more miserable overall. So you must be alert to what you are sacrificing as well as how you are benefiting from fulfilling your ambitions. Future happiness cannot really compensate for misery now: Lost happiness is lost forever. So you need to be pretty confident that any current sacrifices of happiness you make in order to fulfill some ambition or other will actually be worth it in the long run.

So, I hope that you can see three take-home messages from this piece. First, pay more attention to your experiences of life and less attention to the stories you tell about them. Second, find a balance between pleasure and purpose that works for you. Third, make sure your goals make you happy as you strive to achieve them. This will all help you to be happier by design.